Spark at Symposium 2018: What Sessions Are On the Agenda

Spark at Symposium 2018: What Sessions Are On the Agenda

There's a lot to do: travel to Orlando, meet up with old friends (and make new ones!), mingle with folks in the industry, and attend tons of great sessions, company dinners, and after parties. Being an MVP for the first time, I'm personally looking forward to meeting the larger MVP community.

While there's plenty to do around Symposium, it will be the breakout sessions that keep my attention most of the time. What am I looking forward to the most at Symposium? Here's a quick breakdown of a few sessions that I'm hoping to attend.

Empowering your users: Maximizing the content management experience

Presented by: Jeffrey Rondeau

One of my largest areas of focus in Sitecore development is the content authoring experience, and this session is right up my alley. I have presented on this same topic numerous times, so I'm excited to get a new perspective on an old topic. This looks like it'll cover the basics (rendering configuration) and hopefully a few new ways to use other common tools (branch templates).

The Cortex engine: Process at scale

Presented by: Alistair Deneys

The technical details of Cortex have been a mystery thus far, but that changes when it's released with Sitecore 9.1. This sounds like a good overview of the machine learning and processing capabilities of Cortex.

12 personalization tactics to supercharge your digital experiences

Presented by: Lars Birkholm Petersen

Personalization is one of my favorite features of Sitecore, but it's also one that I get to use the least in client deployments. That's slowly changing, so I'm hoping this session dives into more advanced topics around using xDB, xConnect, and Cortex for personalization.

The Sitecore headless revolution

Presented by: Mark van Aalst

New development platforms like Sitecore JavaScript Services (JSS) are working to enable true headless development in Sitecore. This session doesn't target JSS in particular, and instead looks to cover all the various headless development possibilities and paradigms that Sitecore enables out of the box.

How to make content authors LOVE using Sitecore

Presented by: Aravind Ayyanar, Joshua Sampson

More content auther experience, this time with a focus on experience optimization. The Sitecore Client backend is completely customizable, so I'm curious what optimziations this session will be covering, either from a process or technical perspective (or both, ideally).

Hundreds of users, thousands of pages, many designs: how to manage it?

Presented by: Aren Cambre

Even a well-designed Sitecore content tree can become unwieldy with enough growth and time, and thankes to tools like Sitecore PowerShell Extensions, I've taken a great interest taming large content trees. I'm hoping for new insights on large-scale content management in this session.

Why aren't you using Sitecore Analytics?

Presented by: Kristine Stebbins

Quite honestly, the Sitecore analytics and marketing features are my weakest area of expertise. That's rapidly changing, however, and I'm looking to sessions like this to boost my knowledge around these features.

.NET Core and 9.1 architecture

Presented by: Kern Nerskind Nightingale, Stephen Pope

As .NET Core becomes the new standard for .NET development, it's no secret that Sitecore's codebase will migrate over to the new platform. This session sounds like a chance to learn what pieces of Sitecore are already being built with .NET Core, and I consider this a glimpse into the future of the Sitecore codebase.

See you all in Orlando next week!

Do you have questions or comments about this post? Find me on Twitter: @SitecoreSpark